Drones: theirs and ours

Vocal as they are about being bombed from the sky, most Pakistanis – including many on the left – suddenly lose their voice when it comes to the human (Muslim) drone, says Pervez Hoodbhoy

A drone – of the kind discussed here –
is a programmed killing machine. By definition it is self-propelled,
semi-autonomous, and capable of negotiating difficult local
environments. Remote handlers guide it towards an assigned target. A
drone does not need to know why it must kill, only who and how. They
have drenched Pakistan in blood, both of fighters and non-combatants.

America’s drones

These are unmanned
aircraft – MQ-1B Predators and MQ-9 Reapers – operated remotely from
Nevada . In 2004, a Predator-fired Hellfire missile took its first
casualties in FATA. Since that time, constantly circling the skies over
Waziristan , Orakzai, and Bajaur, high-resolution drone cameras have
kept watch on vehicle and people movements over day and night. They are
augmented by a network of ground-based spies and informers who identify
Taliban and Al-Qaida targets. When discovered, they are usually tortured
before being killed.

The 100th
drone strike for 2010 was recorded on November 15. In typical terse
style, a newspaper reported that “a handful of militants, including
Arabs, were killed”. Maybe they were indeed militants. But, then again,
they could have been ordinary people.

Who do drones actually kill?Sometimes
we are sure, as when Al-Qaeda celebrates the martyrdom of its
commanders. About two dozen senior followers of bin Laden have been
taken out by drones in recent years. But in general, ascertaining
casualties of either militants or non-combatants is extremely difficult.
Independent journalists cannot venture into this dangerous war-zone.
Even if one succeeded, he would be limited to a tiny observational area.
The Pakistan Army, or the CIA, have relatively better information but
they too can only guess the damage and fatalities. Their local spies
often have their own axes to grind and tribal scores to settle.

In short, damage
assessment by drones is a free-for-all; you can believe what you want.
Well, almost! Hit repeatedly by missile strikes, militants have
migrated from South Waziristan to North Waziristan and Kurram, where
they are being daily targeted. Drones have prevented large formations of
Taliban fighters from acting in concert. This sort of evidence suggests
they are militarily significant – at least in a limited way.

CIA director, Leon
Panetta, goes much further. He claims that his spy agency’s unmanned
aircraft are “very effective” in taking out suspected militants in
Pakistan . He, like many in the Obama administration, believes that
short of a US ground invasion, drones are America ’s best bet for
destroying Al-Qaida’s leadership.

Pakistan’s drones

Pakistan has many
more drones than America . These are mullah-trained and mass-produced in
madrassas and militant training camps. Their handlers are in
Waziristan, not in Nevada . Like their aerial counterparts, they do not
ask why they must kill. However, their targets lie among their own
people, not in some distant country. Collateral damage does not matter.

The human drone is
infinitely better manufactured than its aerial counterpart. The motor,
feedback, and control systems have been engineered to high precision by
natural evolution over a million years. This drone never misses its
target, which could be a mosque, Muslim shrine, hospital, funeral, or
market. But military and intelligence headquarters have been targeted
with deadly precision as well.

The walking (or
driving) drone’s trail is far bloodier than that of the MQ-1B or MQ-9;
body parts lie scattered across Pakistan . Detection is almost
impossible. The destructive power has steadily increased. The earlier
version had a simple bomb strapped on the back but the newer one carries
plastic explosives packed into vests both on the front and back of the
chest. For additional killing power, the explosives are surrounded with
ball bearings and nails. This killing machine is far cheaper than
anything General Dynamics can make. Part payment is made by monthly
installments to the family, and the rest is in hoor-credits, encashable
in janat-al-firdous.

What must be the
last thoughts of the bomber as he sits in the eight row of mosque
worshippers, moments before he reduces dozens of his fellow Muslims to
bloodied corpses? Can he think beyond instrumental terms? As a murder
weapon, the human drone has no room for moral judgment, doubt, remorse,
or conscience.

Protesting aerial drones

American peace
activists, who are men and women of exceptionally good conscience, are
outraged. Cindy Sheehan and her colleagues have found a new cause and a
new place to be – the drone headquarters at Creech air force base in
Nevada is now attracting placard carrying protesters. The CIA
headquarters in Langley is also becoming a popular place to visit.

Pakistan too has
seen some visible agitation. Given strong anti-drone sentiment, one
might have thought that gatherings would attract tens or hundreds of
thousands. But, in fact, only a few dozen or few hundred people have
turned up at protests, mostly organized by religious right-wing parties.
This is because the culture of street protests has essentially
disappeared – except on blasphemy and religious sectarian matters.
Nevertheless, the small street turnouts do not mask the fact that
Pakistan ’s population is perhaps the most anti-American in the world.
In fact, surveys show that it exceeds Iran and Cuba in this respect.
Drones are one important reason, although there are many other reasons
as well.

Silence on the human drone

Vocal as they are
about being bombed from the sky, most Pakistanis – including many on the
Left – suddenly lose their voice when it comes to the human (Muslim)
drone. There appear to be three key reasons.

First, the bomber –
even if he kills pious Muslims or those in the act of prayer –
sacrifices his life for Islam. Therefore, lest they be regarded as
irreligious, people mute their criticism. The bomber receives an Islamic
burial together with his victims. But paradoxically, even when a
militant group takes credit, many still prefer to believe that the
bomber was a Hindu, Jew, or one purchased by Blackwater. For a long
time, a myth that the bomber was not circumcised was in circulation.

Second, Pakistan
television channels have created a distinctive public psyche. The
country feels sharp pain when attacked from outside but feels little or
no pain when attacked far more ferociously from inside. On an average
day, militants butcher about a dozen ordinary people, policemen, and
soldiers. And yet, when 3 soldiers were killed by NATO troops in October
2010, the country erupted in a paroxysm of rage that could not be
pacified even after repeated apologies.

Third
– and this particularly applies to muddle-headed “anti-imperialists” –
suicide bombers get a lower level of condemnation because they are
supposedly fighting the American Goliath in some unspecified way. I
recall a left-wing rally in Islamabad last year that was called to
protest the public flogging of a Swati girl, Chand Bibi. This rapidly
turned into an anti-drone rally. Typically the chants at such rallies
are: down with religious extremism, down with the Pakistan Army, down
with American imperialism, down with the drones…..

While
this position of “downing” everyone and everything is laudably pure and
pious, it scarcely addresses the question: who shall protect Pakistan
’s population from religious militants, stop the daily dynamiting of
girl’s schools and colleges, prevent human bombers from exploding
themselves in mosques and markets, and end the slaughter of Shiites? The
notion that protection can come from “mobilizing the working class” is
laughable. It is irresponsible to think that somehow the fierce
onslaught of an army of fascistic holy warriors can be stopped by two
dozen earnest people holding colorful placards at the Islamabad Press
Club.

Aerial drones: the downside

The use of unmanned aircraft to kill in another country halfway across the globe raises important ethical and legal issues.

First, and most
seriously, they have doubtlessly killed non-combatants, including women
and children. Smaller warheads and precise guidance have reduced
collateral damage, but killing innocents is never excusable even if
fewer are killed than had artillery or aircraft been used. The fear in
the local population is palpable. A pharmacist in Peshawar told me last
year that the sale of sleep medicines like Valium has skyrocketed in
FATA. One of the ever-circling drones may turn nasty at any moment.

Second, aerial
drones violate Pakistan ’s sovereignty. However, this is a lesser
objection than the first. Pakistan had deliberately chosen not to
exercise force against FATA’s militants until recently. Indeed, since
2002, Pakistan ’s military had turned a blind eye as the Taliban created
their Islamic emirate in Waziristan which collected taxes and tolls,
and steadily increased its stock of weapons and equipment.

Some Pakistanis actually want drones

Not all Pakistanis
are angry at aerial drone strikes. According to Farhat Taj, a Pushto
speaking female researcher at the University of Oslo who makes frequent
trips to FATA, most tribals actually welcome the drone attacks. She says
these victims of Taliban brutality do so out of helplessness and
desperation. They would prefer their enemies to be killed by the
Pakistan Army, but it is also acceptable if they are killed by infidel
America . Bucking accepted wisdom, she claims, “In Waziristan people get
really upset when there are no drone attacks. Their apprehension is
that the US and Pakistani government might enter in an agreement to halt
the attacks.”

It is difficult to
know whether this, or similar statements, should be fully believed. But
there is at least a grain of truth here. Many FATA students in my
university have seen the barbarity of Taliban militants from close
quarters. They want the beasts killed – and they don’t care how and by
whom. For example, a physics PhD student from Mohmand told me that he
has not been back to his village for 3 years and still lives in constant
fear of being kidnapped by militants. His crime? To have protested the
public decapitation by the Taliban of 14 members of a neighbour’s family
outside the village mosque. Even after the mosque’s mullah justified
the head chopping as something that the Holy Prophet (PBUH) routinely
did to his enemies, the sickened student objected – and then promptly
fled.

Not surprisingly,
Kurram's Shiite community of about half a million people is also said to
be largely supportive of drone strikes. They have suffered an estimated
2,000 deaths at the hands of Taliban militants since 2007. Photographs
of severed heads and limbs have been posted on the internet by the
Taliban, who think that Shiites deserve nothing less.

A scientific survey
of attitudes in FATA in today’s dangerous circumstances is impossible.
Nevertheless, the impression one gets in talking to individuals is that
tribal people with education generally favour drone strikes. This
includes those who have lost relatives. But uneducated people, who form
the overwhelming majority, hate them.

Conclusion

Pakistan has three choices.

The first is
surrender. We can stop fighting, accept militant demands, or perhaps
join up with them to fight hegemonic America . One is keenly aware of
its long history of wrongful military interventions overseas, grabbing
of natural resources, and installation of pliable governments.

But the Taliban
want something immensely more dreadful. They stone women to death, force
girl-children into burqa, cut off limbs, kill doctors for administering
polio shots, threaten beard-shaving barbers with death, blow up girls
schools, and kill musicians. In a society policed by Taliban
vice-and-virtue squads, art, drama, and cultural expressions would
disappear. The only education would be that of madrassas.

Seeking to avoid
difficult choices, some influential leftists living outside Pakistan
have tried to wish the problem away. They deceive themselves – and
others – into believing that the Taliban are merely some kind of ethnic
Pakhtun movement. But the emergence of the Punjabi Taliban, and a score
of fanatical organizations with Taliban-like ideology, has proved this
to be nonsense. These movements represent a cancerous malignancy within
Muslim societies that is spreading across borders, boundaries, and
ethnic divides.

Other
leftists have fantasized that religious militants represent some kind
of indigenous, albeit primitive, movement for wealth redistribution. But
social justice is not on their agenda. Where does one hear Taliban
leaders speak about land reforms, or doing away with feudalism and
tribalism? They do not demand worldly things like roads, hospitals and
infrastructure. Instead, they dream of transforming today’s lame
democracy into a fascist religious state where they will be the law.

The second option is to stop fighting and start negotiating.

This
cannot work because Pakistani militants are not united under a central
leadership. Some groups are largely criminal while others have various
ideologies that are extreme but mutually incompatible. Even when one
group is clearly dominant, they cannot be persuaded just by reason and
argument – or even by surrendering.

The
failure in Swat proves this point. The Pakistani government and army
had cravenly accepted the writ of the Taliban and signed on to nizam-e-adil.
In a matter of days the peace agreement was violated, and the Taliban
moved on to the adjoining area of Buner. Their spokesman, Muslim Khan,
announced that they would take over all Pakistan and that they
recognized no authority other than the Qu’ran and Allah. It took
Pakistani society a long time to recognize that surrender in Swat would
not bring peace. This delay was immensely costly in human lives.

The
third way – and the only sensible way – is to fight determinedly
against the militants while keeping open doors to negotiation.
Simultaneously, it is crucial to work on land redistribution, create a
justice system that actually works, control corruption, tax the rich,
and improve governance.

Fighting militants is practically possible only through some mix of local militias (lashkars),
the police and Frontier Constabulary, the Pakistan Army, and American
drones and weaponry. Each of these can be rightly criticized: the lashkars
often have criminals within them and are known to avenge old tribal
scores; the police and FC are notorious for corruption and brutality;
the Army is hung up on its hatred for India so it supports certain
“good” militants while killing “bad” ones; and the Americans have often
cynically manipulated religious fanaticism to their advantage. But
without some combination of these unsavory forces, there will be carnage
of ordinary Pakistanis.

In
this grim situation there is no guarantee of victory, even eventually.
To prevent defeat every effective weapon – economic, social, political,
and military – must be pressed into service. The use of aerial drones,
terrible though it is, is a necessary evil.

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